


End-to-End

by Calesvol



Category: Jessica Jones (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Mr. Robot (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Crossover Pairings, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Post-Canon, Slow Burn, Team Dynamics, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-27 21:40:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16710538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calesvol/pseuds/Calesvol
Summary: A particular type of encryption where a message is scrambled in a way that, at least in theory, only the sender and receiver—and no one else—can read it.





	1. Chapter 1

Warning(s): T, alcohol use

* * *

Hello again.

I know, it’s been awhile since we last spoke to one another. Probably a few weeks now, at least. You’re probably expecting a status update. A brief line of no more than 140 characters and some emojis; a longer, heartfelt post made on Facebook or venting to complete strangers on Reddit. I could do that. But, I don’t have any of those things.

Wait. You knew that already.

I guess I can show you.

I had to move out, put my things in storage. It’s in a place no one will look because I made sure of it. It was done in the middle of the night, and with E-Coin taking over as the world’s currency, it could just be chalked up to a lack of funds and rising prices—the devil and demon of every person nowadays. That, or it had something to do with being an Ex-con. Krista’s old boyfriend will probably think so.

I think I’ll miss it. People are so used to being programmed to walk certain routes that street names and numbers becomes inconsequential. What was 217 East Broadway in the Lower East Side became a street, the low-hanging trees that provided thin coverage from the intense summer sun until long after noon, the chipped sidewalks and the hot grease wafting from Bo Hai Dumpling Town hung like a shroud. It wasn’t always a pleasant smell, but it was familiar. The sort of unpleasantness you became so accustomed to that you’d miss it.

And now?

I found something new.

The nice thing about wearing hoodies and dark jeans is that you don’t really stick out in the streets. In corporate America, you wear light pastels and neutral colors because it’s sterilized,so you blend in incongruously and indifferently. An employed and dispassionate statistic. It doesn’t have the grease and spit of the inner city on its shoes. Bleached and sanitized with sharp angles and watery glass surfaces. It always reminded me of being part of a motherboard. What did that make me? The GPU or CPU? Maybe the APU, both.

It’s all about blending in, knowing your environment.

Most of all, like other dissimilar species, it’s about a symbiotic relationship. I think I’ve found that recently.

“Anything?”

Her feet clop behind me, the shelves to the desk’s right and her back is turned to me, but I can see the sloshing amber liquid splash inside a tumbler. The sharp sting of alcohol follows it, but it’s alright. From here, the remnants of my night on her couch within the office in evident, but she doesn’t have any clients yet. Even if she did, a single blanket is easy to justify and fold away. My belongings are stashed beneath it.

I can feel her presence to my right lean against the window sill, arms folded with the tumbler in hand. In the laptop’s reflection I can see her wearing her usual hunter green tank top and distressed, torn jeans. We have our uniforms and anger management issues in common.

But, that’s not what she’s asking about.

“She posted on her timeline three days ago,” I answer, not bothering to lean aside where she can see the Facebook page I’d pulled up. Hacking wasn’t really necessary. We’d already checked her DM’s the day before, but I was going to check it again. “From Chinatown. 3 PM from an iPhone 6.”

“What about?” Jessica prompted me, surprisingly patient. We’d been working together for almost a month now. I think she’s getting more patient with me, a little less sarcastic. Even if a little less is unnoticeable to most people she talks with, like Malcolm or her adopted sister, Trish Walker. Even now, it wasn’t gentle. A hastiness was present, ineffable.

We work well together, brains and brawn. A symbiotic relationship.

You’re probably wondering how this dynamic works, don’t you? That’s alright, I should’ve said something.

“That’s not her phone. If I can trace the signal and the nearest cell tower it was sent from, I can get a better approximate location.”

“So, why aren’t you? We have to act fast, Elliot. Not like the fucking cops.”

Jessica Jones is a loner. She doesn’t work well with others and avoids them. Deflects from attempts to bring down her walls. With anger issues and a tendency to isolate and self-medicate. It was almost like looking in a mirror.

Two sides of the same coin.

“I’m coming with you.” I can hear her kick off from the window sill she’s leaning on. There’s a tense, frustrated atmosphere in the air. The product of two like-minded, polar-approximate people in the same room. The amount of cohesion wasn’t smooth unless you consider gravel and grit smooth. A lone wolf with no desire for a pack.

She stood next to the desk chair’s armrest, defiant and glaring down at me. “That wasn’t part of our agreement,” came her clipped rebuttal, a snarl on her lips. Arms folded, Jessica cocked a hip. “I thought this was some… _Pinky and the Brain_ bullshit. You act like some drone on steroids and I do the groundwork.” She clapped her tumbler down with an audible clunk. “Besides, if you didn’t get the goddamn memo, I don’t do the teamwork horse shit. The last thing I need is to be some fucking babysitter.”

“I’m not saying you have to guard me. I just need to be at the location in person.” I couldn’t remove my eyes from the screen. The tracking algorithm was close and needed an eye on it.

“Did the last few days not happen or what?!” she rebutted back angrily. “You came to _me_ , not the other way around! You wanted my fucking protection from whatever bullshit you’re caught up in!”

The clacking on the keyboard stopped, my eyes never lifting. But, my attention was there, flicking to her in hyperfixated intervals. “That’s not why I did,” I replied quietly, throat dry. “I don’t need protection. What we both need is what we lack.”

Frustrated, Jessica snatched the glass and stalked away towards her couch, flopping unceremoniously upon it. “You said you needed the abilities I have, Alderson. Why the hell else are you here?” she fumed at me. “Yeah, you’re a good hacker, but you’re also a liability. And that’s the last thing I fucking need.”

…I wasn’t sure how else to explain this to her. How did you break away years of walls when neither was really poised to budge? Easy: you didn’t. People were difficult to understand, stressful at best. Loneliness may have been a constant shadow looming over me, but sometimes, it was preferable to being in a room with a thousand conflicting voices and pretending like those people somehow got along. I went to Jessica Jones because I couldn’t return home and because of what I could bring for her. Being a skilled hacker was rare in New York. Being a hacker who at one time owned the FBI and Whiterose’s networks was even rarer. I was an asset, a valuable one. Anyone could see that. Even someone who normally didn’t stand to benefit from someone like me.

The parts of a machine didn’t have to get together once a week for book clubs over Starbuck’s. They just had to run together to complete their tasks.

My gaze on the screen precipitously drifted towards her. “Let me do what I have to. Completely separate from what you are.” That was my offer, my final condition. That we didn’t have to evolve into something parasitical was what we both wanted. Dependency and attachment didn’t suit us. I knew my features were like stone, carved into place. Her plaster was only a little more malleable than my own.

The pregnant pause was long. Long past term.

“…Fine,” Jessica groused as she downed the rest of her spirits in one gulp. “But if you get into trouble, that’s on you, Alderson.” Her own terms were harsh, but clear. We were partners, not friends or something more.

And that suited me just fine.

She grabbed her leather jacket and stalked towards the door, slamming it emphatically behind her.

I returned to the command line. It wouldn’t be much longer now.


	2. Chapter 2

Warning(s): G, some references to alcoholism

* * *

People don’t ask to be observed. There’s no waiver, no disclosure letting them know what they’re getting into. I knew everything I could about Jessica Jones. About her victimhood under Kilgrave, the car accident that led to most of her family’s death and adoption, the experimentation, even up to the return of her mother and the death that followed at the hand of her adopted sister.

This was normal for someone like me. What came from a want to eliminate awkward conversation was becoming a means of protecting myself.

Our mission—if we could call it that—was simple. Almost routine. A girl gets mixed up with a guy involved in a gang, and he tries using her as a source of income when they’re strapped for cash. A fake kidnapping scheme to get her parents to pay up. Simple, and easily foiled.

Too easily foiled. I was starting to see why Jessica preferred to go analog on these cases. It kept things interesting, fresh. Made me realize how being a hacker could make these kinds of things almost boring and routine.

Busting the Ron’s Coffeehouse owner of child pornography was one of those examples. I doubt her associate, Hogarth, would approve of something so presumably unlawful.

Unlawful. Plenty of people would call it vigilantism. Was that what I was? A vigilante? Was I Jessica’s sidekick now, or was she mine?

The police had come. They always did. Mobbing in their flotilla of flashing lights and blaring sirens to sound like they’d had a bigger hand in this than they really had. As if two individuals operating partially outside the law hadn’t done their job for them, but in their round robins of incompetence and secret rings of white supremacy, they’d pat themselves on the back on a coffee break well done. A mediocre reminder that they were somehow still relevant in a world vastly better off being self-governed.

Our tax dollars at work.

It was early in the morning that our work had finished, and late at night when everything had wrapped up. The fire escape we were perched upon reminded me of something from the Hardy Boys, maybe. Or maybe just a singular, childish want to sit beneath the stars. Except, in the city you rarely saw them.

Companionable silence was underrated. The idea that you could be by someone and still feel as though you were bonding without speaking is powerful. Something I could revel in, easily. Rather than fill the silence with how the weather was, you learned about each other. I wonder if Jessica felt it, too.

“You held yourself up better than I thought you would.” Her tone isn’t high with praise. Flat, but still—it was an achievement not to undersell.

“Lockpicking is almost natural to a hacker. At least the ones I know,” I replied after much thought, glancing over at Jessica. She didn’t seem particularly impressed, but I suppose it could be hard to be when she and others she knew literally had superhuman abilities.

“I wasn’t just talking about the lockpicking, Elliot,” she said with a small chuff. “I don’t like dealing with people who can’t pull their own weight around. I think I might be changing my mind. _Might_.” Particular emphasis on that word. That was fair. We weren’t exactly buddy-buddy. Maybe that might never really come to pass.

We were silent for a long moment, until the liquor in her paper-bagged bottle stopped swishing and she gazed distantly ahead, thoughtful. A car passed through the quiet street. Otherwise, it almost felt like it was just us two. But, a question hung in the air. Usually these kinds of silences were precursors to that.

“What is it like? The thing with you and Mr. Robot?”

There it was.

People tended not to ask. It was an elephant in the room, the denominator between normalcy and an uncomfortable closeness to what could go wrong in people. Like realizing deadly diseases interacting with us every day. Skimming your hand on boiling water but not willing to scald your skin off. Jessica had already been flayed. She understood.

“Sometimes, it’s like he’s in the room with me. Like he’s actually there. Interacting with me, with others—except, no one can really see him.” I felt a pressure at my temples. “…Sometimes, people can see him, too. Because it’s me. Sometimes, I don’t know if he’s controlling me, or if I’m just watching him. He’s been quiet lately. But, all I really knew is that he can’t get rid of me any more than I can, him.”

Jessica grew quiet as I told her, gaze blanking into the distance. I could only wonder what she was thinking, probably the obvious. Maybe I didn’t really want to know. Because getting in people’s heads can make you lose yourself.

And I’d already lost a lot to Mr. Robot. We were just learning to work together.

Maybe she was thinking about her own Mr. Robot. Kilgrave. Except, he existed, once. In a sense, he’d always be kept alive in her. Haunting her memories through the abuse.

Something in me wanted to touch a hand to her shoulder. I don’t think she’d like that.

So, I didn’t.

“…It’s cold. I’m going inside.”

I didn’t say anything, nodding mutely before gazing out at the street. Sometimes, a change of scenery from a computer screen was necessary.

The window slide shut, but it was unlatched.

A few more minutes. Maybe a few more hours.

I wasn’t really sure yet.

Something came out from tonight, I think. Maybe something good.

Only time would tell.


End file.
